Thread (52 messages) 52 messages, 6 authors, 2011-02-25

Re: too big min_free_kbytes

From: Shaohua Li <hidden>
Date: 2011-02-23 05:29:17

On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 22:25 +0800, Mel Gorman wrote:
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 10:25:24AM +0800, Shaohua Li wrote:
quoted
On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 10:58:08AM +0800, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
quoted
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 04:27:55PM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
quoted
totally untested... I will test....
The below patch is fixing my problem and working fine for me... as
expected it can't possibly lead to any D state, it's pretty much like
setting min_free_kbytes lower, and it's not going to alter anything
other than the levels of free memory kept by kswapd.

$ while :; do ps xa|grep [k]swapd; sleep 1; done
  452 ?        R      1:20 [kswapd0]
  452 ?        S      1:20 [kswapd0]
  452 ?        S      1:20 [kswapd0]
  452 ?        S      1:20 [kswapd0]
  452 ?        S      1:20 [kswapd0]
  452 ?        R      1:20 [kswapd0]
  452 ?        R      1:20 [kswapd0]
  452 ?        R      1:20 [kswapd0]
  452 ?        R      1:20 [kswapd0]
  452 ?        S      1:20 [kswapd0]
  452 ?        R      1:20 [kswapd0]
$ vmstat 1
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system--
  ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us
  sy id wa
 2  1   1784 111040 2393336 807924    0    0    63   992   56   70  1   1 96  2
 0  1   1784 108928 2402556 801864    0    0 122624     0 1619 2150  0   5 80 16
 0  1   1784 110664 2401244 801140    0    0 122496     0 1602 2081  0   3 81 16
 0  1   1784 109796 2410184 792984    0    0 122752     0 1685 2149  0   4 80 16
 0  1   1784 110416 2411856 791208    0    0 120448     4 1599 2075  0   4 81 16
 1  0   1784 113516 2415344 785336    0    0 122496     0 1636 2125  0   4 81 15

I doubt we'll get any regression because of the below (see also my
prev email in this thread), and I would only expect more cache and
maybe better lru. Previously the free memory levels were stuck at
~700M now they're stuck at the right level for a 4G system with THP on
(I'd still like to try to reduce the requirements only 1 hugepage for
each migratetype in the set_min_free_kbytes to reduce the requirements
to the minium, but only if possible..). But this saves 600M over 4G so
it's the highest prio to address.
Sorry for the later response, I offlined several weeks.
The patch is addressing the 8*high_wmark issue, which isn't the original issue
I reported (sure the 8*wmark issue should be fixed too).
min_free_kbytes is set higher and cause more pages freed even no the 8*wmark
issue. wmark:
before: min      1424
after:	min      11178
The higher min_free_kbytes is expected as a result of using transparent
hugepages so I don't really consider it a bug. Free memory going up to
about 700M as a result of kswapd is a real bug though.
quoted
in our test, there is about 50M memory free (originally just about 5M, which
will cause more swap. Should we also reduce the min_free_kbytes?
Either that or boot with transparent hugepages disabled and
min_free_kbytes will be lower.
Fixing it will let more people enable THP by default. but anyway we will
disable it now if the issue can't be fixed.

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